Is there a "white upper class" privilege in educational achievement in France?
Is there a "white upper class" privilege in educational achievement in France?
Image Chumakov Oleg (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023
Friday, September 16th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin), room K008
Is there a "white upper class" privilege in educational achievement in France?
Insights from an intersectional empirical design
Philippe Coulangeon
Directeur de recherche CNRS, Sciences Po - CRIS
This presentation applies the intersectional analytical framework to the analysis of the impact of class, gender, and origin on educational outcomes in contemporary France, relying on data from the 2007 panel of the Ministry of national education matched with those of the first waves of the ongoing EVA (Entrée dans la vie active) survey of the INSEE. This longitudinal data set tracks the educational trajectories of young French people from the time they enter junior high school (classe de 6ème), around age 11, until age 25.
The intersectional approach of the intertwining effect of these variables is operationalized through the Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) originally developed in social epidemiology (Merlo, 2018, Evans et al., 2018; Green, et al., 2017). This approach relies on the definition of strata based on the intersection of four variables: gender, class, origin, and cognitive abilities measured at 11. It differs from the usual approach by the interaction terms between these variables in that it allows the identification of specific combinations in which these effects interact more particularly, even in the presence of limited general interaction effects.
The most salient result relates to French native students of upper-class origin with low cognitive level at age 11 who, even when controlled for the additive effects of these characteristics, display a higher probability to reach an upper tertiary diploma than non-native students from lower social background but higher cognitive abilities measured at 11. On the other hand, non-native students from lower social backgrounds and low-cognitive abilities do not experience a specific “intersectional” penalty. This result suggests a kind of “white upper-class privilege” that may be partially interpreted in terms of compensatory advantage (Bernardi, 2014; Bernardi and Triventi, 2020).
